Currently, when creating a new wiki on PBwiki, one must choose between ‘Classic Editor’ and the ‘experimental WYSIWYG editor’. Depending on your answer, this enables (or not) our fancy new editor for that wiki. We’ve been receiving a lot of praise for the new editor (thanks guys!) as well as a few questions regarding continued support for our old interface that we would like to address.

As it stands now, there is no way to change editing style for a particular wiki. Once you create a WYSIWYG wiki, it can’t be edited in the classic â€œWikiStyleâ€? interface, and vice-versa.

We’re going to change that.

First and foremost, in January we will be giving all wiki administrators the ability to upgrade their wiki to WYSIWYG mode. There will be no charge for this upgrade!

Additionally, for those of you who just can’t get enough WikiStyle, you will also have the option of editing WYSIWYG wikis with our classic, WikiStyle editor. We can’t promise that all new WYSIWYG-specific features (like plugins) will be available, but you should still be able to use the same wiki markup that you have come to know and love.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning how we came around to this decision. The decision to maintain support for WikiStyle editing was greatly influenced by feedback from our users. We originally thought WYSIWYG would be the best option for everyone. But we sought feedback, mulled it over at lunch, and came to the conclusion that 1) we underestimated how much people like our classic interface and 2) Red Lobster’s cheese rolls are amazing. Listening to feedback is a big part of PBwiki, and drives a lot of the discussions here.

Stay tuned for more progress around WYSIWYG editing, and other new PBwiki features!

We’re so excited to welcome Brian Klug to the PBwiki team! He sold his house and flew to the Bay Area all the way from Virginia. He’ll be working on the WYSIWYG interface immediately, and then some other stuff we have up our sleeve. A little bit about Brian:

Brian co-founded MindSay with Adam Ostrow in 2003. Bringing over 12 years of software development and industry experience, he enabled the birth of a competitive blogging product in a tightly growing market. Before MindSay, he was president of his own web hosting company. At MindSay, he used his extensive product, technical and operational experience to architect, design and implement MindSayâ€™s 130,000+ member social networking and blogging site.